In the spring of 2009, when the respectable plan for a college senior was to find a job and the available jobs had begun disappearing, Tiffany Rafii and Sarah Terzic proposed a less respectable plan. The childhood friends, then college roommates, asked their parents for a year. They would start a public-relations company. They had no grand theory about the architecture market and no immaculate list of dream accounts. Rafii later described the original client filter with unusual economy: almost anyone willing to hire them qualified.
This is not the origin story consultants usually put in the pitch deck. Yet it contains the first useful fact about UpSpring. The founders were willing to begin before they had located their eventual advantage. The second useful fact arrived about a year later, when they noticed that design businesses had sophisticated work and surprisingly unsophisticated communications. Few agencies seemed intent on learning the particulars. UpSpring stopped behaving like a PR shop for everybody and started becoming a translator for one complicated world.
That world now includes architecture and interior-design firms, engineers, builders, real-estate companies, hospitality operators and the makers of the fabrics, walls, windows, furniture, pools, tile and appliances that enter their projects. UpSpring says it works with more than 80 clients and employs more than 50 people. The head count has moved around in public directories, as agency head counts do, but the direction is plain: the company once founded by two students who imagined staying below ten people did not stay below ten.
The specification table has two sides
To understand the niche, picture an architect choosing a surface for a hospital lobby. On one side of the table is the firm doing the specifying. On the other is the manufacturer trying to be specified. A generalist agency sees two prospective accounts. UpSpring sees one decision system. The architect needs a reputation that wins the commission; the product brand needs familiarity and trust before the architect opens a sample binder. Editors, awards juries, trade shows, search results and technical proof influence both.
That is the company's clearest distinction. It is not merely familiar with tasteful photographs or a list of shelter magazines. It claims fluency in how consideration becomes selection inside the built environment. Its competitors include specialist firms such as Novità and the architecture practices of larger PR agencies. The other alternative is common and cumbersome: one vendor for press, another for branding, a web shop, a freelance writer and an internal marketing director conducting the orchestra between meetings.
“The measure of success is not a press clip. It is whether the right people in your market know who you are before the conversation starts.”UpSpring’s description of its work
UpSpring starts with the business a client wants next - a new geography, a richer project type, a place on a shortlist - and works backward. A byline can make an executive legible. An award can provide peer approval. A website can convert curiosity into a meeting. Media coverage can lend the third-party credibility that a paid claim cannot. The pieces are ordinary; the order is the product.
The first model was supposed to stay small
The early plan did not work quickly. It took roughly three years to make the first hire. The first version of the founders' ambition was also wrong: at one point, they said the agency would never exceed ten people. What changed their minds was not a motivational slogan but the machinery of scale - clearer systems, team leaders trusted with daily operations and a culture that allowed employees to follow new interests instead of waiting for a title to open.
Then a service gap forced a larger decision. UpSpring could earn attention for clients, but it could not always build the digital infrastructure that attention landed on. Epiphany Studio, founded by Susan Fernandez, had the complementary problem. It could build brands, websites, search programs and digital campaigns, while clients still needed press and industry recognition. After years of referrals, the companies tried a joint pitch in early 2022. Fernandez has said the logic became obvious in the room. From that pitch to a signed deal took about four months. UpSpring acquired Epiphany that year; neither side disclosed the cost.
The acquisition did not change the market UpSpring wanted. It changed the number of things the agency could do once inside it. Today the list includes media relations, brand positioning, visual identity, websites, SEO, content, email, social and paid media, events, award submissions, crisis work and go-to-market strategy. In 2026 it added an AI Authority Audit, examining how firms appear in large-language-model answers and AI search. This is a new label for an old concern: what does the market believe about you when you are not in the room?
The case studies are vivid. UpSpring says its PJCArchitecture campaign produced 31 placements, more than 544 million impressions and six design awards. Its launch for MONOPOLY Queens Edition reportedly sold out in five days. For Soake Pools, the agency reports $1,712,108 in revenue from $17,139 in paid-media spend in 2024. In a Buster + Punch campaign, $7,000 of seeded cookware generated a reported $45,000 in earned media value and 51 influencer posts.
These are agency-reported client results, not an expected return for the next client. Impressions mix many kinds of exposure, earned-media value depends on a methodology, and ad-attributed revenue is not the same as profit. The useful evidence is narrower: UpSpring can connect communications work to a stated commercial measure.
What is actually for sale
UpSpring is a private professional-services business, not a software platform. There is no public rate card. Projects and ongoing relationships pay for senior strategy and execution; the company says the people who pitch the work remain involved in doing it. It reports that an average client engagement lasts more than four years. PRovoke Media's 2025 ranking listed $8.4 million in 2024 fee income. The Epiphany purchase price and UpSpring's valuation were not disclosed.
Those absences matter because specialist expertise is hard to price from the outside. A manufacturer is not buying a quantity of social posts. It is buying less time spent explaining what a specifier is, which trade editor matters and why “or equal” can be the three most annoying words on a project. The economics make the most sense when the client has a meaningful growth objective, enough proof to support a position and leadership prepared to participate.
The part worth stealing
A reader does not need an architecture client to borrow the central move. First, define the decision you want to influence. Second, map who participates before that decision is visible. Third, create proof that travels without a salesperson: a case study, a respected third-party mention, a useful executive idea, a demonstration, an award with real standing. Finally, make every channel tell the same story. The simplicity is deceptive. Most marketing departments begin with the channel because the channel has a calendar.
There are conditions. The approach is a poor fit for a commodity bought mainly on price, a company without credible work to point toward or a leadership team demanding immediate leads from reputation work. It also weakens when specialization becomes tunnel vision. UpSpring itself briefly expanded into healthcare, consumer goods and other sectors, while its current positioning has swung firmly back toward the built environment. A niche helps only while the niche teaches the firm things outsiders do not know.
UpSpring's history is appealing because the insight did not arrive fully formed in the dorm room. The founders began broad, found a corner that rewarded curiosity, built systems after discovering that hustle did not scale and bought a company when referral alone no longer solved the client's whole problem. They changed the model without discarding the accumulated knowledge that made the model valuable.
The built environment is full of objects designed to endure: buildings, fixtures, textiles, furniture. UpSpring's wager is that reputation behaves similarly. One appearance is decoration. A coherent body of evidence, assembled over years and visible before the shortlist is written, becomes structure.